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Matt Hinch, Author

A friend of ours is a writer, a story of his was runner-up in the Open Season Awards of the Malahat Review, a literary journal published four times a year by the University of Victoria, BC. So cool. Anywho, the category was Creative Non-Fiction, it’s an interesting read and almost too intimate and uncomfortable in its’ details. I feel like Matt really bares his soul. Here’s an excerpt, then take a look at his blog here.

He posts rarely but they are well worth the wait. I guess it’s writers that can turn the banal into something brilliant.

On a different note, I finally finished pruning! Yay, I really should work on not being a total control freak. Other people can prune too, but I just can’t help but want to do it all!

OK, here’s the excerpt:

Lessons in Animal Death

My father was an apprentice butcher before he married into a pastoral Roman Catholic family (I was the germ that prompted action) and became a farmer. In one of my earliest memories I’m standing on the slats of the woolshed pen before a sheep carcass hanging by its fetlocks from a twinned hook, watching my father at work. The whick-whick, whick-whick as he sharpened his knife, the blade flickering from one edge to the other. The peeling of the pelt, exposing flesh and fat, a mottled map of bluish veins that only moments earlier had pulsed with life. The neat incision as he made a vertical cut down the middle of the animal. The iron-rich taint in the air. My fascination with the innards, the coil of intestines, the pink flaps of lung, the dark shapes of kidneys and liver, the blood oozing from the ventricles of the heart. My father equating these organs with the hidden contents of my own belly. I watched as my father pulled the guts from the sheep, the intestines tumbling over themselves into a bucket. He separated the organs we ate, liver and kidneys for us, heart for the cat, placing them in a stainless steel bowl. I touched the intestines, marvelling at their heat, the residue of life.